Fiercely Attending to Place with Trebbe Johnson
Fiercely Attending to Place with Trebbe Johnson
September 3rd - September 24th, 2024 with a final meeting October 22nd
Meets every Tuesday from 7 pm - 9 pm EDT via Zoom for 5 weeks.
The places in our lives have great power. Some of them make us feel excited, comfortable, or right at home. In others we feel frightened or alienated or envious. Even places we take for granted, such as the supermarket or a parking lot can evoke different feelings under different circumstances—different either in the place or in us.
In this practice/workshop, we explore the feelings of place. Together we open up the lenses of our imagination, our emotional body, and our profound relationships with all the locations that hold and are held by us—and then you, the photographers, open up the lenses of your cameras to this powerful, often mysterious, and always intimate world.
Bringing hyperawareness (or “fierce consciousness”) into the reactions that place stirs up in us, we call forth the artist in us to articulate those rich and personal reactions.
Photographers will visit a different place each week and photograph it from different perspectives, for example, places where you feel:
· happy
· anxious
· excluded
· curious
· blasé
When you explore the relationship between person and place with your camera, what happens? How do you express your feeling about a place in a photograph? How do you express yourself in that place in a photograph? And how does your photographer’s eye perceive the way other people experience the place?
This will be an intriguing opportunity to heighten our awareness of where we are... how places activate feelings... and how place, feeling, and photography create something new and extraordinary!
Kinship uses a pay-what-you-can honor system with a minimum donation or $50. The average contribution for a six-week practice group is $125. Please give as generously as you can. If you cannot afford the minimum contribution of $50 please don't hesitate to request a scholarship.
Trebbe Johnson began thinking about bringing attention and beauty to wounded places in 1987, when she interviewed Oneida engineer David Powless and he told her of his belief that the steel waste he had received a National Science Foundation Grant to recycle was but “an orphan from the circle of life.” Before founding Radical Joy for Hard Times she pursued this path by guiding a week-long retreat in a clear-cut old-growth forest on Vancouver Island, British Columbia; offering a ceremony at Ground Zero, New York two months after the September 11 attacks; and leading a workshop in a burned forest. Trebbe is the author of The World Is a Waiting Lover and three books on finding and making beauty in hurt places: Radical Joy for Hard Times: Finding Meaning and Making Beauty in Earth’s Broken Places, 101 Ways to Make Guerrilla Beauty, and You Have Made the Earth More Beautiful! She has written many articles about people’s emotional and spiritual relationship with nature. She lives in Ithaca, New York.
